Dick Cheney was Right

The last major foreign policy kerfuffle we had was a few months ago where we had those dueling foreign policy speeches between President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Of course, the conventional mainstream media wisdom was that Obama rocked the body that rocked the party, and we R’s would prefer it if Cheney just disappeared.

What actually happened was that, after the two speeches, late that Friday night after the media all went home, Obama signed an executive order (just like how George Bush would do) saying that he could hold terror suspects indefinitely (again, like George Bush). The moral of the story…Dick Cheney was right.

But that was then. Now, enhanced interrogation techniques were said to provide valuable intelligence says…THE WASHINGTON POST? Here is JBdotC senior foreign policy adviser Stephen F. Hayes with the report…

The Washington Post has an important front-page story this morning, with matter-of-fact reporting on the importance of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad as an intelligence source and the enhanced interrogation techniques that made him talk. The piece is headlined: “How a Detainee Became an Asset: September 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding.”

One key source is former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, who acknowledged that two of the CIA’s “most powerful” enhanced interrogation techniques “elicited a lot of information. Certain of the techniques seemed to have little effect, whereas waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information,” he said in an interview with the Post.

Helgerson authored the 2004 IG report that the Department of Justice released on Monday. The evidence presented in the IG report made clear that EITs had been effective, but Helgerson, well-known inside the CIA as an opponent of the program, stopped short of making that claim in a declarative fashion. In his interview with the Post there seems to be a subtle shift in his argument. In the IG report Helgerson had written that “measuring the overall effectiveness of EITs” is challenging and a “subjective process.”

Make sure to read Mr. Hayes’s full report. All I can say is that if the President, his boss Ms. Pelosi, and the rest of the Democrat Party want to make an issues out of this – again…get the popcorn!